RESPONSE TO “STEPS TOWARD A SCIENCE OF FREE WILL”: Determinism,Nondeterminism, and the Distinction Between Uncaused and Unpredictable Behavior

Howard's (1993) reconceptualization of free will and determinism is elaborated to distinguish between uncaused and unpredictable actions by drawing on principles derived from chaos theory. Findings from research on the career alternatives pursued by women are related to the distinctions proposed in these models. Further debate, elaboration, and empirical scrutiny of these ideas are encouraged.     

The NCATE Process and behaviorally-based special education

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has long sought to identify effective programs for teacher preparation in this country. Recently, the Council has revised its standards to be more rigorous and demanding. This revision presents new and challenging standards for the accreditation of programs preparing educators. The most problematic but most important of these new standards is the requirement of a well-articulated knowledge base supporting a program's content and processes. Development of the knowledge base statement involves the articulation of the program's philosophy, theme, model, goals, objectives, primary research base, wisdom of practice, and evaluation procedures. A behavioral model serves well in meeting these requirements, particularly since behavioral applications in education are well researched and the approach is compatible with the emphasis on specific goals and objectives and evaluation of effectiveness. Effective educational methods are available and are mostly behavioral. The articulation of the NCATE knowledge base encourages education faculty, traditionally nonbehavioral, to examine the effectiveness of their programs and to demonstrate research and professional support for content and instructional methods. A behavioral knowledge base statement appropriate for NCATE is demonstrated through examples drawn from Gonzaga University's knowledge base for special education.     

The effect of temporal constraints on the value of money and other commodities

The value of hypothetical rewards of various delays and durations, consisting of money or other commodities, such as automobile use and vacations, was measured by the psychophysical up-down staircase method using an amount of unrestricted immediate money as the titrated variable. A model of temporal discounting based on implied constraints on anticipated consumption rate described the data. Further explicit constraints on consumption produced predictable deviations from the model. The concept that consumption is normally constrained together with time discounting may also explain the interaction between amount and delay of monetary reward in determining value and may provide the basis for a theory of addiction based on learning to increase consumption rate.     

FACILITATING GENERALIZED REQUESTING BEHAVIOR IN BROCA'S APHASIA: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF A GENERALIZATION TRAINING PROCEDURE

The effects of a generalization training procedure on requesting by 4 subjects with chronic Broca's aphasia were examined using a multiple baseline design across behaviors and subjects. Subjects were trained to request information on three topics sequentially. Generalization across topics and persons was assessed in weekly probe sessions consisting of 5-min conversational interactions with trainers and unfamiliar volunteers in a nontreatment setting. Results revealed generalization effects were greatest when trainers, as opposed to unfamiliar volunteers, served as conversational participants. Nevertheless, subjects' requests increased with all conversational participants to a level comparable to a normal comparison group assessed under conditions identical to the experimental probes. Social validation of treatment effects using a subjective evaluation procedure revealed significant improvement on the parameters of talkativeness, inquisitiveness, and conversational success.     

Working with families on an inpatient psychiatric unit for children: Hospital staff members are family therapists,too

Inpatient psychiatric units for children can be potent agents for family change. The activities of nursing, education, and activity therapy staff are an important addition to a program of formal family therapy in psychiatric hospitals. These modalities must be organized into a family framework so that insights and achievements from one arena may be generalized to another.     

The effects of intrafamily threats on therapy

Family members often threaten one another during the course of therapy. Such intrafamily threats can cause anxiety for the therapist and disrupt treatment. Examples of commonly encountered threats are given and their management discussed.     

Enhanced recency effects with changing-state and primary-linguistic stimuli

A number of explanations for the modality effect in immediate serial recall have been proposed. The auditory advantage for recall of recency items has been explained in terms of (1) the contributions of precategorical acoustic storage (PAS), (2) an advantage of changing-state over static stimuli, and (3) an advantage of primary-linguistic coding. Four experiments were conducted to evaluate these hypotheses. In the first, subjects viewed seven consecutive rectangles of different colors on a computer monitor. A small recency effect was obtained when the task was to recall the colors of the rectangles in order, with the size of the effect being independent of whether the rectangles remained stationary on the screen or moved in one of four directions. However, when the task was to recall the direction of movement of the rectangles, a larger recency effect was found. This pattern of results was interpreted as suggesting that recency effects are enhanced by changing-state stimulus information, but only when the changing-state information serves to identify the stimulus. Experiments 2 and 3 provided converging evidence by demonstrating an analogous recency advantage for changing-state visual stimuli that were somewhat different from those of Experiment 1. Experiment 4 demonstrated recency effects with synthesized speech stimuli that were substantially greater than were those found with the changing-state visual stimuli of the first three experiments. Implications of the results for the PAS, changing-state, and primary-linguistic hypotheses, as well as temporal-distinctiveness theories of recency, are discussed.     

Design decisions in a Pascal-based operant conditioning system

FREDL, a Pascal-based system for control of operant experiments, has been implemented on the IBM PC computer. In the foreground, recurring operations, such as decrementing counters that serve as local clocks, are controlled by a dictionary specifying automatic properties of user defined variables, and random logic is implemented by a user-written Pascal overlay. In the background, the remainder of the program controls communication with the user, output of data to disk, and production of cumulative records.     

An integrated approach to computer usage in the teaching of experimental psychology

Ongoing development of a series of laboratory modules for experimental psychology courses is described. The modules are designed to be implemented on a network of TRS-80 microcomputers, which are linked by a Network 3 controller. Within each module, the computer controls stimulus events, records individual data, probes the student for understanding of experimental concepts, and tabulates the class data. In addition to a discussion of the modules and their software implementation, the required hardware is described.